21–30 of 159 posts
If your goal is to minimize the number of remaining words in the worst case, I think SERAI is the winner, leaving you with at most 697 choices. [Assuming my code is right]
I don't like the "exploration" strategy of playing Wordle. Once you have a start word, work onwards from there (aka "hard mode") rather than enter another random guess to narrow down more letters. I know it is a valid strategy, but idk just feels like cheating to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I bet "s" in final position is much rarer than in typical text, because Wardle seems (reasonably!) to prefer base words over plurals, as well as past tense, participle, and other modifications. For me the most useful immediate information is about vowels, making "adieu" quite useful. But "irate" and "inter" are also pretty good. Most people focus on the yellow and green results, but the grey results can be even more…
We all draw our lines somewhere different, of course, but to my mind, taking into account Wardle's specific choices as exposed in the source code feels like cheating, vs taking the full list of 5 letter words that his code "accepts". Knowing what answers are actually "true" ahead of time is more information than I'm comfortable taking advantage of. And yes, eliminating letters is crucial - in my opinion it's always b…
It seems clear to me that there is an optimal starting word, but that the best second word has to depend on the info you gain from the first. Case in point: If you get 3 green 2 yellow in the first word, you can solve on the next guess. Of course, you can constrain your strategies to "I always use the same two/three starting words", and in many cases that will be fine. But it's quite obviously not optimal. Also, the…
That's a very specific edge case, though.
I agree with you that the second word should vary depending on the first result, but picking the best first and second words require lots of analysis. The first word should be picked in order to open up the best options for second word, and while I believe the second word should not contain letters from the first, unless you got extremely lucky, the distribution of letters of remaining available words probably changes which letters you want to cover.
Failing to do the required analysis, my current strategy is to pick two words that cover the 10 most common letters in english, ETAOINSHRD. Sometimes it's "ethos" and "nadir", sometimes "thine" and "roads", etc. So far, it's worked well.
Player 1) create a predictable process that can guess wordle words
Player 2) given the full code of 1 find a word that will not be found by that process in 6 steps
The game is over if someone can decide a process that catches all valid 5 letter words in 6 steps.
This strategy seems to avoid words that Wordle will accept, while not choosing them as word-of-the-day, e.g. SERAI. If your goal is to minimize the number of remaining words in the worst case, I think SERAI is the winner, leaving you with at most 697 choices. [Assuming my code is right]
If no answer, use reliable hints ( i.e on Twitter) to better inform the initial guess.
Beyond that, the best initial word goes beyond information theory, letter frequency, etc to also be a word that has a realistic chance of being word of the day. As a trivial example, AEIOU may reveal some information on the first guess, but I find it extremely unlikely that you will win Wordle in 1 with this guess.